On a June evening, I was at the Heathrow Airport in London boarding a flight for Bogotá. I was travelling to be at a wedding I had come close to not attending. At the boarding gate next to mine, passengers lined up for an EVA Air flight to Taipei. I watched strangers queue for a plane like the ones my father, Captain Hamid Reza Alimardani, used to captain. He had flown that route for years. I had flown it once when he was captaining it, and I still remembered the small jolt of pride in seeing him walk up to the gate in uniform. My father, the captain.

We lost him six years ago. When the EVA Air crew came through to board, I caught myself scanning their faces, searching for him. I was flying into his absence. The airport, the office of his entire working life, reminded me that there was no leaving this grief behind, only different directions within the same departure.

I had spent the morning crying. Not over the Taipei gate. Not yet. I broke down at a boarding gate in Oslo after reading of the death of Marjane Satrapi, the graphic novelist and filmmaker, who wrote, drew, and filmed Persepolis, her extraordinary memoir of a girlhood in Iran before and after the 1979 revolution. She was 56. Her husband had died a little over a year earlier. Her family described the cause of her death as: “she died of sadness.”

I read the words “died of sadness” and something in me came undone. I cried the way you cannot stop. I cried the way you frighten the people around you. I cried until I thought I would not be able to board the first of my three flights to the wedding in Colombia. I cried because I knew the wedding would remind me of my grief, my loss, and everything else Satrapi had taught me to name as a girl, when I first discovered her graphic novel.

I did not know Marjane Satrapi. But I had come of age inside her work, the way many of us did, the Iranian girls and boys whose childhoods, lives, and families were defined by a revolution and the politics of a country we would spend most of our lives away from. She took the private grief of one Iranian life and transformed it into something the whole world could hold. In a frame in Persepolis, the protagonist Marji describes goodbyes as “a little like dying.” I must have read it as a teenager and thought it was a clever, sad line. I did not know then how literal this metaphor would become.

The pilot who flew through fire

My father didn’t come from money. He was the first in his family in Tehran to get a college education. He dreamed of medical school in his early 20s. When Iran Air offered him a fully funded path to train as a pilot in the United States, he accepted. Iran Air was among the finest airlines in the world in the 1970s, when my father trained with it. Then came the revolution in the winter of 1979, and Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini transformed Iran into a theocratic Islamic Republic. Nine months after the revolution, the war between Iran and Iraq erupted in September........

© Time